Over the next week while we cleaned out her apartment, we found evidence of opioid and benzodiazepine abuse. During the week after Mom died, Morgan and I planned the entire funeral, wrote an obituary, wrote and gave a eulogy, identified our mom’s body at a crematorium, cleaned out her entire apartment, and suddenly took on roles as detectives as we uncovered the secrets of my mom’s addiction to pills that we didn’t know about while she was alive. The more we uncovered, the more questions we had. In the weeks and months to come, I became obsessed with finding out answers and became stuck in the “investigative” stage of grief.

To heal, we have to feel the pain. An easy sentence to write but an incredibly hard one to live. Real healing requires work. It takes effort to feel pain. It’s easy to disconnect and suffer alone. What’s difficult is picking up the phone for the third day in a row and saying, “I’m still not okay.”

But, if you’re like me, the question you’re asking yourself right now is how do I “feel my pain?”

People also say, “You never get over it, but you learn to move on.” We move on out of necessity, because the world doesn’t stop when a person dies. Everyone else, everything else, continues regardless of your pain.